FAMILY MATTERS
A father said to his daughter “You have graduated with honors, here is a car I bought many years ago.”
It is a bit older now but before I give it to you, take it to the used car lot downtown and tell them you want to sell it and see how much they offer you for it. The daughter went to the used car lot, returned to her father and said, “They offered me $1,000 because they said it looks pretty worn out.”
The father said, now “Take it to the pawn shop.” The daughter went to the pawn shop, returned to her father and said, ”The pawn shop offered only $100 because it is an old car.”
The father asked his daughter to go to a car club now and show them the car. The daughter then took the car to the club, returned and told her father,” Some people in the club offered $100,000 for it because it’s a Holden Torana and it’s an iconic car and sought by many collectors”
Now the father said this to his daughter, “The right place values you the right way,” If you are not valued, do not be angry, it means you are in the wrong place. Those who know your value are those who appreciate you……Never stay in a place where no one sees your value.
Relationships Series: “Uncomplicated: Bringing Godly Clarity to Relational Complexity.”
INTRODUCTION: Relationships are vital. Family is God’s idea. God made us to function best only in relationship with Him and with others. God exists in a relationship of three equal persons; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Father: The Father of Jesus Christ, Jesus: the only begotten Son of the Father,The Holy Spirit: The Spirit of both the Father and the Son.
It is very difficult to know who you are without knowing who your father is. IF you trace your genealogical tree it will go all the back to Father God.
Christian identity is settled by who we are in relation to Someone Else; God.
Understanding that you are not orphaned, abandoned or rejected is critical to the revelatory discovery of who your Father is. It is from this discovery that your existence is defined and all the pieces from the mysterious puzzle of life come together.
Galatians 3:26 “For Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.”
Romans 8:16 “ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God”
1John 3:2 “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.”
GOT A QUESTION FOR YA >>>>>Who’s your DADDY?
Genesis 35:16-18 Story of Jacob and Rachel
“Then they moved on from Bethel. While they were still some distance from Ephrath, Rachel began to give birth and had great difficulty. 17 And as she was having great difficulty in childbirth, the midwife said to her, “Don’t despair, for you have another son.” 18 As she breathed her last—for she was dying—she named her son Ben-Oni. ….
Ben-Oni, which means in Hebrew “son of my struggles.”
Some of us are struggling, having embraced identity from the wrong place; from a place of death and struggle.
NOTE: Listen, Control your conversations! Choose your words carefully both in private and public, on text, or facebook. Listen to this, every word that comes from your mouth has an address assigned to it! Believe it or not, what is said in private will soon be made public either by choice or by mistake.
“Vs 18… But his father named him Benjamin.” The child’s father took up the child and re-named him; Benjamin, which in Hebrew means “son of my right hand.”
Fathers have a massive role in the function of a family. Without that element it is dysfunctional. It doesn’t mean it can’t work but all the load is not supposed to be on the mother. However, in this “Cancel Culture” of lack of commitment, the strongest ones are the mothers who have to balance it all. On the rare occasion the father is the one holding the fort together.
The voice of the Father is revealing your identity in the midst of your struggle.
Psalms 118
1 Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good! His faithful love endures forever.
2 Let all Israel repeat” “His faithful love endures forever.”
3 Let Aaron’s descendants, the priests, repeat: “His faithful love endures forever.”
4 Let all who fear the Lord repeat: “His faithful love endures forever.”
5 In my distress I prayed to the Lord, and the Lord answered me and set me free.
6 The Lord is for me, so I will have no fear. What can mere people do to me?
7 Yes, the Lord is for me; he will help me. I will look in triumph at those who hate me.
8 It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in people.
9 It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes.
10 Though hostile nations surrounded me, I destroyed them all with the authority of the Lord.
11 Yes, they surrounded and attacked me, but I destroyed them all with the authority of the Lord.
12 They swarmed around me like bees; they blazed against me like a crackling fire. But I destroyed them all with the authority of the Lord.
13 My enemies did their best to kill me, but the Lord rescued me.
“For beauty and clarity to be revealed you need context. Example: Diamond in setting. The Family of God is the context where the Nature and Kingdom of God are best displayed” — Ps. Karl
“God is revealed in my life by the quality and connection in relationships with people” Zach Sloane
Family Matters. It was God’s idea. But what do we mean by family? What is Family?
Merriam Webster (online dictionary):“The answer to the question “what does family mean?” is both difficult to answer and highly subjective. The word has shifted its meaning considerably since it entered our language, currently contains many different senses, and in at least one of these senses may signify different things to different people.”
Whatever your frame of reference for family is, it’s important to note this:
Ephesians 3:14,15
“For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,…”
In Greek the word is “pas: πᾶς, πᾶσα, πᾶν: all, every
Usage: all, the whole, every kind of.
Interpretation: All families, the whole family, every kind of family gets its name from the Father or our Lord Jesus Christ.
A few observations about family:
1. Family is Inclusive
2. Family is Messy
3. Family Functions
FAMILY IS INCLUSIVE: “Family Inclusion is the active and meaningful participation of parents and family in the lives of their children.
Godly families are not small. They are all inclusive and all welcoming with no filters or prerequisites. We need to Learn how to open our arms without clenched fist. The power of the hug has healing. Fully embraced and fully accepted.
God defines his role in Psalms 68. God has a place in his family even when you feel left out, alone, alienated, deserted and helpless floating in a sea of despair.
Psalms 68:5-6
“A father of the fatherless, a defender of widows ,is God in His holy habitation. God sets the solitary in families; He brings out those who are bound into prosperity; But the rebellious dwell in a dry land.”
Psalms 34:17 – 19 (NASB) The righteous cry, and the LORD hears and delivers them out of all their troubles. The LORD is near to the broken hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, But the LORD delivers him out of them all.
We have to become familiar at communicating to a broken, alienated world, where relational and familiar ties are being broken, where families in which people should grow up and flourish are becoming more and more places of pain and dysfunction. We have to be able to speak to a generation and a world around us, “come, welcome home, you have a place in the family of God.”
When I say, “Impact is a place that love built” remember our foundation is love, our framework is families and our chief cornerstone is Jesus.
Luke 11:2 “So He said to them, ‘When you pray, say: Our Father in heaven…’”
All humanity has our origin in God. Fallen as we may have been, sin didn’t change that, it may have marred and distorted it, but never changed it.
Humanity’s problem is we have forgotten the Rock from which we were hewn. We as the church have an obligation to the world, a debt of love to show them what the family of God looks like, what it looks like to live in relationships of love and self giving, what it looks like to be sons and daughters, and what our relational God really looks like.
We were all created in the image of God. Sin distorted and maybe disfigured it but sin can never change what God created!
Family is Messy. What if it’s messy, broken, or you feel like a failure in your family relationships? First of all, there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.
Secondly, have you seen God’s family lately?
Jeremiah 3:8
I gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce and sent her away because of all her adulteries.
What about God’s kids? They get into all sorts of trouble.
Parent shaming: the idealism of unrealistic and misguided expectations where people judge you by the behavior of your children. That’s a real thing! Often comes from idealistic notions of what it looks like to be a good parent, usually taken from some outdated, out of context scripture verse or latest cultural fad.
Christian version: Clothing, Hairstyle, make up, off grid, communal, cultural.
Proverbs 29:15
To discipline a child produces wisdom, but a mother is disgraced by an undisciplined child.
Others seem to suggest if you have ambitions in the church to lead or serve if your kids don’t perfectly reflect Jesus in all their choices then you have somehow failed as a parent and are disqualified from service in his church.
Proverbs 22:6 ESV
Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.
What if the way we are to train up the child, the way we want them to return to, is to a sense of love and grace, mercy and compassion. A way in which yes, actions have consequences, but where grace does much more abound in the presence of sin and rebellion, and love is chosen because of its beauty and freedom, not out of fear of a rod?
Even the family of God is messy. We are made up of all sorts of people, with all sorts of backgrounds, mindsets, even kinds of faith.
Romans 14:1-3
Accept other believers who are weak in faith, and don’t argue with them about what they think is right or wrong. 2 For instance, one person believes it’s all right to eat anything. But another believer with a sensitive conscience will eat only vegetables. 3 Those who feel free to eat anything must not look down on those who don’t. And those who don’t eat certain foods must not condemn those who do, for God has accepted them.
How do we live in a family where there is so much mess, so many ideas, opinions, needs, mess? People have a right to stand on their rights but not when it contradicts righteousness.
Romans 14:13 & 21-22
13 So let’s stop condemning each other. Decide instead to live in such a way that you will not cause another believer to stumble and fall… It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything else if it might cause another believer to stumble. 22 You may believe there’s nothing wrong with what you are doing, but keep it between yourself and God.”
What defines us and identifies us is not our political, economic and educational status but our relationship to the Father. This means that in the family of God there will be differences in opinion but there is latitude and gratitude in grace on how we do family. Jesus is the common denominator. He is the union that binds us together when other platforms are trying to pull us apart.
Remember the family that prays together stays together.
How does the devil destroy the church? Be destroying the family because the church is built from families. “We may not have it all together but together we have it all”
3.Family is Functional. Families that are fractional are fragile and have a high percentage of failing without a father figure. Pastor Karl said, “Make your factions function”
Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina (1878):
“All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Tons of ways to be dysfunctional but…
Ephesians 5:17-21
“Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit…”
19 speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord,20 always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
If you want to be a functioning family, walk by faith; be filled with the Spirit. Let Jesus fill your cup, don’t put that on anyone else. When you are filled with the Holy Spirit, your perspective changes from what am I getting to what am I giving. When you’re filled, there is no room for anything else.
Colossians 2:9-20 “For in Christ lives all the fullness of God in a human body. So you also are complete through your union with Christ, who is the head over every ruler and authority.”
John 7:39-39 “He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”
Shawn Bolz Ignite Conference at Impact Church
The next revival, the next move of God is going to look a lot like “healthy family.” Family Matters! It was his idea. You are welcome, you belong, you have a home in the family of God! You have not found a house at Impact but a home.
